A Game of Thrones (II)

I finished the book. I gave it a 5 star rating on goodreads, where the average rating is 4.43. It’s a good book. I was considering whether it should have four or five stars, but in the end I decided that I probably give too few books 5 stars and this one kept me reading for many enjoyable hours, so…

It should go without saying that the second half is no worse than the first half; in retrospect it’s a natural plot development (some of it you can probably see coming, other things…), and Martin is quite good at this plot development stuff; after having read 800 pages you sort of feel that this story has only just really begun.

I’ll most likely read A Clash of Kings sometime this summer, but I won’t start reading that one this afternoon. I have yet to decide if I should start watching the tv-series before reading the second book, or if I should wait – I’ll probably wait. Anyway, these books are entertainment, not learning, and I feel a little bit guilty about not really having learned anything at all during the last few days; so I think I’ll read Kromosomafvigelser hos mennesket (‘Chromosomal abnormalities in humans’) by Peter Jensen next. I need a breather and this is my way to ‘breathe’. As that book is in Danish I’m not sure if I’ll cover it here in any detail, but I may say a word or two about it later on. I bought it on a sale (for 20 kroner ~$4..) and if it hadn’t been on sale I probably wouldn’t have bought it – there’s certainly no way I would have paid more than 100 kroners for it. I expect to finish it in a short amount of time as it’s quite short and as this is not the first book I read which deals with this topic.

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I think you should try watching Season 1 before you move on to the 2nd book — you might decide after all that the adaptation is a lot better than the book itself and switch to watching instead of reading. (Not to mention that watching takes you far less time than reading…)

I really liked reading the book, so I think I’ll probably also really like reading the next book in the series.

I consider reading and watching to be potential complements here, not necessarily substitutes. If the books are good and the tv-series is good too, I’ll probably derive more total utility from both reading the books and watching the tv series than I’d derive from just limiting myself to one medium.

Given how enjoyable the book was, I don’t think it’s very likely that “the adaptation is a lot better than the book”. From a semi-long-run perspective the time constraint is not really that big of a factor; reading the next book will probably take a couple of days as well, but that’s not very long compared to how much time I’ve spent on some (non-fiction) books. This is the kind of stuff I want to make time for.

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This blog is mainly a site where I keep track of and share some of the stuff I read and learn. Only a small subset of the posts on this blog deal with economics – I have diverse interests, and as the category cloud in the sidebar below illustrates this blog contains posts about all kinds of stuff: Mathematics, physics, statistics, geology, geography, health care and medicine, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, history, anthropology, archaeology, chess, …

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"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)